الكتب

The papers in this volume were presented at the international conference on "New Approaches to the Design of Development Policies" organized by the Arab Planning Institute (API) in Beirut, Lebanon . In addition to these papers, two invited papers were prepared for, and presented in, the conference by Ibrahim El-Issawy and Mehdi Shafaeddin. The paper by El-Issawy is on "Self-Reliant Development: An Alternative Model to the Washington Consensus and the Possibility of its Implementation in the Globalization Era"; while that by Shafaeddin is on "Is Industrial Policy Relevant to the 21st Century?". These two papers are not included in this volume, but are published as special papers.

In the call for papers for the conference it is noted that the motivation for holding the conference under the above title is the observation that over the period since 1980, and up to the recent past, the design of development policies in developing countries was dominated by Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) of various vintages. This general approach has come to be termed the Washington consensus. Under this approach, and according to the World Bank a “country with poor policies would be one with high inflation, large fiscal imbalances, and a closed trade regime” (World Bank (1998)).